As the sun emerged and water began to recede in parts of flood-ravaged Houston, Tropical Storm Harvey shifted its wrath to the Beaumont-Port Arthur area of Texas, hitting the region Tuesday and Wednesday with record-breaking rainfall and devastating floods.
“Our whole city is underwater right now but we are coming!” Port Arthur’s mayor, Derrick Freeman, said in a Facebook messageovernight, as desperate residents sent out calls for help on social media.
Water filled homes and submerged roads, evacuees crowded shelters, local officials urged people who needed rescue to hang sheets or towels from windows, forecasters warned that the storm could spawn tornadoes, and the Louisiana State Police closed Interstate 10 heading toward Beaumont, just a few miles from the state line. The rain was expected to continue until Friday.
In Houston, residents woke after the first night of a citywide curfew, many of them going outside for the first time in days to survey the wreckage.
Here is the latest:
• Local officials have reported at least 31 deaths that were related or suspected to be related to the storm. The victims include a police officer who died on his way to work; a mother who was swept into a canal while her child survived by clinging to her; a woman who died when a tree fell on her mobile home; and a family that is believed to have drowned while trying to escape floodwaters in a van.
• More than 32,000 people were in shelters in Texas, and 30,000 shelter beds were available, Gov. Greg Abbott of Texas said at a news conference on Wednesday.. Federal Emergency Management Agency officials said 230 shelters were operating in the state, and that 1,800 people had been moved from shelters to hotels and motels.
• FEMA has supplied five million meals so far to evacuees, and 210,000 people have registered with the agency for assistance, the governor said.
• The National Guard has conducted 8,500 rescues since the storm began, Governor Abbott said, and the police and firefighters in the Houston area have done a similar number. About 24,000 National Guard troops will soon be deployed for disaster recovery in Texas, he said.
• The storm made its second landfall at 4 a.m. Wednesday just west of Cameron, La., near the Texas border, the National Hurricane Center said. Harvey was expected to move northeast, gradually weakening and becoming a tropical depression by Wednesday night.
• Parts of the Houston area set a record for rainfall from a single storm anywhere in the continental United States, with a top reading on Wednesday morning of 51.88 inches since the storm began, though the threat of heavy rainfall has passed for the Houston and Galveston areas. Flooding remains a concern in Houston, Beaumont, Port Arthur and southwest Louisiana, the center said.
Port Arthur and Beaumont in Texas were hit hard overnight.
Those cities and other places in Jefferson County, Tex., east of Houston, were desperate for help after heavy rain there overnight caused floodwaters to rise precipitously.
In Beaumont, emergency workers rescued a young girl who was floating in the floodwaters, suffering from hypothermia and clinging to her mother’s body. The mother died, but the girl was in stable condition, the police said in a statement.
The mother, identified by the police as Colette Sulcer, 41, had been driving down a service road when she pulled into a parking lot and got stuck. Ms. Sulcer and her daughter left the car, but were swept away by the water, floating about half a mile, the police said A group of emergency officials found the pair just before they were swept under a trestle. Had they floated under it, the workers would not have been able to save the child, the police said.
Local news reports from Port Arthur showed that shelters and homes were flooded, and residents and reporters said that there were not enough people answering emergency calls. Calls for help surged on social media.
“Our heart is breaking for our community,” the Jefferson County Sheriff’s Office said
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